Peter Kedron

Rapid declines in biodiversity necessitate global action and spatial tools that can inform how to set and implement action for new conservation targets. GIScience (the science of geographic information systems, or GIS) has proven useful for conservation decision‐making, driving the development of new data, tools, and mapping solutions. Combined with urgent conservation needs, it is an ideal time to examine additional opportunities to advance a geographic approach to conservation. Here, we outline a hierarchy of needs that should be prioritized to ensure that GIScience and geography can support the new, and growing, wave of global conservation targets. Based on a participatory workshop involving conservation and GIS researchers and practitioners, we recommend six actions organized around three themes: platforms, personnel, and partnerships. Those six actions include: (1) build standard platforms for data sharing and maintenance; (2) design predictive models for decision support; (3) develop open educational materials that stress problem solving; (4) infuse co‐design into courses and learning materials; (5) support a GIS Conservation Corp and culture; and (6) sustain engagement across academia and practice. Implementing this agenda will lead to bridged knowledge systems, greater trust in spatial evidence, new funding pathways, and durable connections between spatial scientists, conservationists, and decision‐makers translating geospatial innovation into measurable biodiversity gains.

Researchers increasingly call for transparent reporting of analytic decisions as foundations for reproducible research and collective knowledge production. However, these calls for openness often overlook a critical dimension: software environments encode implicit computational decisions that are not always visible to researchers, even when the same statistical methods are applied. Analyses may be technically reproducible, while the epistemological function of reproduction to evaluate and validate prior conclusions is undermined by the opacity of software design. Moreover, unexamined software behavior can compromise the conceptual rigor of research by shaping analytic choices unbeknownst to researchers. While attempting to reproduce a study correlating spatial distributions of COVID‐19 and people with disabilities, we investigated how software‐encoded decisions influenced intermediate analytic outputs, propagated into downstream inference, and ultimately shaped the research design. Through systematic comparison across software, we demonstrate that (1) software‐encoded decisions structure both intermediate results and final analytic conclusions; (2) researchers must remain attentive to the decisions and materials required to execute an analysis, understand what software is doing on their behalf, and consider the numerical and conceptual ramifications of those decisions; and (3) cross‐software sensitivity analysis is particularly important when analytic workflows span multiple platforms or when outputs from one system are used as inputs to another.

Recent research in the field of geographic information science shows that reproducibility and replicability of publications have substantial room for improvement and proposes various actions to improve the situation. However, the impact of these actions remains unclear. This study investigates the combined effect of novel author guidelines and workflow review process, which award badges for successful reproductions, on the potential reproducibility of articles published in the AGILE conference series proceedings over the past decade. While replicating the approach of previous studies, this work expands the scope of prior reproducibility assessments and systematically compares the findings for the AGILE conference with those of the GIScience conference series proceedings, which has not undergone similar changes to guidelines or procedures. Results indicate that the reproducibility guidelines and the review process measurably improved the potential reproducibility of AGILE publications. The comparison with GIScience papers further suggests that clear and enforced guidance is a key driver for change. Our findings demonstrate the value of institutional policies and community norms in fostering reproducible research in the GIScience field and identify pathways for its ongoing improvement.

Researchers increasingly call for transparent reporting of analytic decisions as foundations for reproducible research and collective knowledge production. However, these calls for openness often overlook a critical dimension: software environments encode implicit computational decisions that are not always visible to researchers, even when the same statistical methods are applied. Analyses may be technically reproducible while the epistemological function of reproduction to evaluate and validate prior conclusions is undermined by the opacity of software design. Moreover, unexamined software behavior can compromise the conceptual rigor of research by shaping analytic choices unbeknownst to researchers. While attempting a reproduction of Chakraborty (2021) we investigated how software-encoded decisions influenced intermediate analytic outputs, propagated into downstream inference, and ultimately shaped the conceptualization of research design. Through systematic comparison across software, we demonstrate that 1) software-encoded decisions structure both intermediate results and final analytic conclusions; 2) researchers must remain attentive to the decisions and materials required to execute an analysis, understand what software is doing on their behalf, and consider the numerical and conceptual ramifications of those decisions; and 3) cross-software sensitivity analysis is particularly important when analytic workflows span multiple platforms or when outputs from one system are used as inputs to another.

The curricular models used to teach GIScience may leave students underprepared to independently address real‐world problems. Scholars have identified an overreliance on step‐by‐step tutorials as a key issue and have called for changes in curriculum design. We argue that one solution to these problems is for students and instructors to work together to attempt to replicate recently published empirical studies. The inclusion of replication projects in the GIScience classroom provides a number of benefits, including immersing students in current scientific debates and linking student work to unresolved questions, all while increasing the body of replication studies in the geographic literature. Here, we conceptually link project‐based learning and replication, and provide an actionable framework and classroom materials educators can use to integrate replications into a semester course. Drawing on our experience attempting replications with students, we discuss common challenges faced when implementing this approach and the path to successfully publishing such studies.

Pharmacies are more accessible than other health care services, providing frontline primary and preventative health care. Recent research has underscored the importance of pharmacy access for reaching underserved and rural populations. However, minimal attention has been given to the spatial and temporal dimensions of access to pharmacy care despite evidence that geographic accessibility impacts the utilization of healthcare services. This study measured spatiotemporal variation in access to pharmacy care across Vermont using the enhanced two-step floating catchment area (E2SFCA) method. We surveyed 102 (87%) Vermont pharmacy locations for data on hours of operation and staffing levels during Fall 2023, and we completed data for an additional 15 in-state and 75 out-of-state locations with public data and imputation. Population data was sourced from the Census and road data from OpenStreetMap. We computed hourly spatial accessibility scores by county subdivision for weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and compared results for metropolitan, micropolitan, and rural areas, testing for significance using the Kruskal–Wallis H Test. Our findings reveal significant disparities in pharmacy access between rural and urban areas. Access also dropped significantly on Saturdays and Sundays compared to weekdays. We found proportionately greater reductions in access on weekends for rural areas than for urban areas. Virtually all Vermonters lack access to community pharmacies at night, while the daily cycles of access are similar across urban and rural areas. Our study revealed important urban-rural differences in the spatial accessibility of pharmacies across Vermont and highlighted how temporal accessibility compounds with spatial accessibility in rural areas. The results are useful for informing public health policy and the provision of health services. We have also demonstrated the importance of data on pharmacy operating hours and service levels for modeling spatiotemporal pharmacy accessibility, highlighting the need for further research and improving centralized databases to facilitate research in this field.